New Book of the Week

The MANIAC

by Benjamin Labatut

Labatut's first novel, When We Cease to Understand the World, was a favorite of the New York Times, Barack Obama, and most important, me. This one is even better than its predecessor. Like the earlier book, The MANIAC can be read as pure truth, but the factual narrative Labatut assembles is as artfully composed and strikes to the heart as powerfully as fiction does. His main protagonist is the polymathic scientific genius John Von Neumann, who fathered most of the important technologies of the 20th century, including the hydrogen bomb and the computer (the novel's title derives from the acronym for one such early device). The range of his accomplishments is vast, but their cumulative effect is terrifyingly amoral. The tantalizing promise of artificial intelligence that Von Neumann pioneers appears in the end more like an existential threat. Nevertheless, one man, filled with a hopeless heroism, defends humanity as bravely as an anonymous protestor facing down a column of tanks in Tiananmen Square. Altogether unique, The MANIAC is both direct and deep, a novel of astonishing intellectual heft that moved me nearly to tears. It's a masterpiece. —James

New Book of the Week

Company

by Shannon Sanders

How I loved spending time with these people! Members of a big, multigenerational Black family with branches bohemian and bourgeois, they live vibrantly on the pages of this debut collection of fiction. It's remarkable how effectively Shannon Sanders uses her characters to comment on societal changes of the 20th and 21st centuries without letting them lose a whit of their individuality. Linked together in a glittering chain of language, their stories combine to create a treasured heirloom. —James

New Book of the Week

Ladies' Lunch: And Other Stories

by Lore Segal

I remember watching my grandmother cut an intricate shape for me out of paper. She did it with unhesitating confidence, turning the paper rather than the scissors, and made the process look like magic. Her gnarled fingers didn't have the strength my young ones did, but she had a clear vision, an economy of movement, and a lifetime of wisdom to draw on. Lore Segal possesses the same qualities as a writer. At the age of ninety-five, she retains all her deftness, her shearing wit, and a sureness of purpose that produces astonishing emotional effects. These skills, used in a droll examination of a made-to-order topic, the straining of familial and friendly relationships under the pressures of old age, make this story collection a very special one. —James

New Book of the Week

Our Strangers

by Lydia Davis

Lydia Davis has a voice unlike any other in fiction, and her gnomic stories, sometimes no longer than a paragraph, are always worth reading, turning over in your mind, and re-reading. I can't help suggesting that her latest collection is the one most deserving of attention, though, thanks to her defiant refusal to allow it to be sold anywhere other than in independent bookstores. —James

New Book of the Week

The Long Form

by Kate Briggs

A fictional account of the quotidian interactions between a new mother and her new baby that is also a commentary on what a novel is and what it is to write one. Philosophical and highly experimental, yet rife with living human moments, it advances the work of literary geniuses such as Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein. The Long Form is a book of real and lasting significance. —James